Jay Electronica’s “Act 1” Has Finally Been Mastered. We Spoke to the Man Behind the Boards.
Jay Electronica’s Act 1: Eternal Sunshine is the most exquisite release in rap history, but it’s never been mixed or mastered…until now.
We interviewed the record’s engineer and co-producer, Mike Chav, about why he finally mastered Act 1 nearly fifteen years after its original release.
Jay Electronica. Photo credit: Jason Goldwatch, courtesy of Dan Petruzzi
One of the greatest pieces of modern music was a rough mix.
That changed last month, when engineer and producer Mike Chav released the remaster (or more appropriately, “first master”) of Jay Electronica’s Act 1: Eternal Sunshine, the hybrid child of a classical music suite and a 2007 DatPiff mixtape. Act 1 featured Jay Electronica rapping over Jon Brion’s score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: it was drumless, rife with religious imagery, and filled with obscure news clips and movie dialogue. Erykah Badu (who would soon bear Jay Elect’s child) and Just Blaze provided a spoken-word introduction. At a time where hip-hop was embroiled in a civil war—with ”Crank That” and T-Pain on one side and Jay-Z’s “D.O.A.” and Nas’ Hip-Hop Is Dead on the other—Jay Electronica’s Act 1 was like a UFO landing from a planet way beyond left field.
The end is coded in the beginning. The ethereal nature of Jay’s work remained part of his artist DNA and has been reflected in his output since: one iconic single in 2009, a run of features in the 2010s, one good album with Jay-Z in 2020. The sequel to Act 1, a 16-track unfinished opus aptly named Act II, wouldn’t surface for nearly 15 years, only to officially disappear again a few months later. Which leaves his fans to endlessly debate whether Jay Electronica is rap’s most elusive artist, hip-hop’s greatest disappointment, or, bar-for-bar, the greatest MC to ever pick up a mic.
Whatever your opinion is on the artist, I’ve never met a music fan that wasn’t blown away by Act 1: Eternal Sunshine. Which is crazy, because the version that floated around the internet since 2007 was nothing more than a YouTube-quality MP3. The record’s engineer, Mike Chav, didn’t get a chance to finish it before it leaked. Fifteen years later, he’s finally mastered the fifteen minutes of music that changed hip-hop history.
We interviewed Mike Chav about Act 1 from his studio in Detroit. Chav is a hip-hop legend himself—ask him about his work with J Dilla, D12, Erykah Badu, and most recently Arabian rap stars Sons of Yusuf—and our conversation was chock-full of unheard lore, including how Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon influenced the making of Act 1.
Chav, thanks for talking to Countere. What made you decide to remaster Act 1 now, and what changes can you hear in the remaster?
I was talking to someone who was deep into music but had never heard of Jay Electronica, and I was giving them the short version of the story and why he’s important. My favorite piece of Jay Electronica’s work has got to be Act 1: Eternal Sunshine. We were working prior to that for years, but that’s where things really took off. The response we received from that was in line with what we had always kind of expected. People lost their shit over it. It was an emotional, weird, mysterious piece of work that came from nowhere, at a time when no one was doing anything remotely like that.
I was trying to explain all of this, and I decided to listen to it the next day. I go in the studio and pull up the original WAV file because I don’t want to listen on YouTube. I play it on my speakers. First thing that hits me is how loud and piercing Just Blaze’s vocal is on that intro. It comes in so harsh.
Overall, the whole volume of the piece was a little bit quiet. The “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” soundtrack is is sonically great already, but we never really mixed or mastered it. So the whole thing sounded a little unbalanced. As an engineer, it pains me to hear things that aren’t finished or that I think could’ve been better. I was like, “I can make this better within 20 minutes, so I’m going to do this right now before I lose the desire.”
I pulled up the original files for Act 1: Eternal Sunshine. I would have to do a little bit of work to pull up the mix files for each song—those sessions are from 2007, the 2021 version of Pro Tools is different, some of the plugins don’t exist anymore—so I pulled up the session that we were using to organize everything.
I decided that it is what it is as far as the mix goes. I always hate it when I listen to re-mixes of music that I’ve heard a billion times. I hear it immediately—they re-mix Beatles records, or the Nas record Illmatic, and maybe it is sonically better, but it doesn’t hit me the same. I want it to hit me like I always heard it.
The original Act 1: Eternal Sunshine session that was used to organize all five tracks. Photo credit: Mike Chav
Still, I did a few little tweaks on the overall mix of everything. There’s certain frequencies that poke out that were bothering me, and I used a little bit of sorcery to tame them and get the piece set up so that I could master it. I’ve been using the ARIA mastering service (where you can control a robotic arm on analog equipment) for a long time now, so I know how to get it to do what I want.
When I put it in ARIA, I used the setting that is intended for classical music. (According to ARIA’s website, this setting is “E—Extra Dynamic: for a cappella or very light acoustic or classical recordings.”) I added two notches of low end. When you get into orchestral music and things that generally don’t have notes that are in the sub-frequency range, you get something really nice when you boost those sub-frequencies below the notes. It just adds weight, literally. I started to hear it in my studio monitors, like “This is good.”
“We were shooting for that space you feel when you listen to “Dark Side of the Moon” in headphones.”
I added a little bit of width to the piece—two variations of spread. In mastering, they sometimes play with the stereo field to make the sides appear like they’re wider than they are. I used the smallest increment of that. I added some high-end but decided it was too irritating on the ears. I wanted to keep the piece more on the darker side; I’m going for more warmth and fullness than brightness and loudness. Because Act 1 was never mastered, every time it would play alongside other things in my iTunes there would always be a volume discrepancy. It needed to be louder, especially because there’s no drums. But I didn’t want it to be louder at the expense of the dynamics and the original feel we put into it.
The whole vibe of that piece—of that whole era when we were working together on all of Jay’s music—was definitely a Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon love. That dark texture. We were shooting for that space you feel when you listen to Dark Side of the Moon in headphones. Smoke a joint and listen to that shit, and you’re literally inside of it. We actually bought and used a Chandler Mini Mixer, which is an EMI replica of the console that they used in Abbey Road Studios, the console that Dark Side of the Moon was mixed on.
“Even as we were making it, it was exciting, like “Where is this going to go?””
That’s why you can hear on “Voodoo Man,” there’s some panning with the vocals and the news clip that you can hear in the headphones. Jay wanted that news clip to play at the same time as his vocal. But when you do that, one is kind of stepping on the other and you can’t hear either of them. So we slowly faded them into each ear and then brought them back. It was just little things like that as far as the space and the ear candy. The mood of the instrumentation was set by Jon Brion, but all the textures and layers that we added had more to do with effects, analog delays, Pro Tools plugins. I think we used the Sci-Fi and Lo-Fi plugins. And we used certain frequencies, oscillators, to make the vocals wider, tie them into the original music, and bring that mysterious quirkiness to the piece.
You can really hear it in the Willy Wonka samples on “…Because He Broke the Rules.” It sounds like Willy Wonka is some type of creep speaking from another dimension. It’s spooky, weird, a little bit unsettling. Even as we were making it, it was exciting, like “Where is this going to go?” Act 1 was not planned out, it just unfolded from that original piece of “Eternal Sunshine.”
Editor’s note: After Jay Electronica released “Eternal Sunshine,” the first track from Act 1: Eternal Sunshine, onto his Myspace, he traveled to Detroit to link with Mike Chav to record the rest of the project.
“Eternal Sunshine” is extremely lo-fi. He recorded his vocals right into the laptop mic, used Logic or Garageband, and that was that. Whatever he sent off his computer is the final version that went into the mix with the rest of the songs. So the first time you hear him, you get this really lo-fi piece, and everything else is somewhat crispy and hi-fi. I like that. When you have something that sounds great, and something that sounds fucked up, it becomes obvious it was a creative choice, instead of “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Anyways, after I finished the master, I decided I might as well put this out for everybody. Because it’s just a low-quality MP3 floating around there on YouTube, which is a rip of the original release on Myspace. We didn’t even really get to mix it. I wanted to. I gave him the rough mix on the night we wrapped everything up. I thought we’d go back the next day and make adjustments. But the next day, that shit was on the Internet.
Can you tell us about the studio sessions making the record?
I think it took about a week to do the additional three songs and record the intro. [Checks files] It was from June 19 to June 30, 2007. But it’s not like we were working directly on it for a week solid. We spent time thinking about it, talking about it. There were other ideas that were floated around, other tracks from the Eternal Sunshine soundtrack that we considered. I don’t think he recorded anything; sometimes they would just be written to. Other times, it would just be a lot of chilling, hanging out, watching movies at my house in Detroit.
Jay Electronica in the studio, circa 2007. Photo credit: Mike Chav
I recorded “When the Time Comes” (a Mike Chav-produced track that was considered for Act 1) during those sessions. I recorded that before the intention was to just use Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind music only. It was late at night. I think Jay had passed out. When I played “When the Time Comes” for Jay in the morning, I believe he was writing to it, but he was like '“Should we use this? Or should it just be all Eternal Sunshine music?” Ultimately, it just made sense for the project to just keep moving in that direction.
Jay lays his vocals in one take, almost always. Usually there’s no punching in. If there was one word that wasn’t the right inflection, he’ll just record the whole thing over. But usually it was a couple takes and that was it. It wasn’t like he’d obsess over recording vocals. He’d spend a lot of time listening, writing, saying it to himself; I’d leave the room and he would do his thing. But when he was ready, I’d record it and add effects. For the amount of impact it had on his career and all of our lives, really, it probably took the least effort that I’ve ever put into anything.
Mike Chav at Electric Lady Studios in New York, circa 2007. Photo credit: Erykah Badu
We recorded the intro last. We spent a good amount of time, a day or two, getting Just Blaze and Erykah Badu recorded. Back then it was not a simple thing to record a phone call in Pro Tools. We got some app and recorded direct from a phone, and the conversations with them were much longer than what was on the record. That was just an edited version of those conversations.
After that, we sandwiched everything—the intro and the four tracks—into one big 15-minute file (which is the one that I remastered). We were originally deciding whether to cut it up into five separate tracks or leave it as one big track. Ultimately, Jay decided “Fuck it, make ‘em listen to everything at once. You know someone’s gonna cut it up anyways.”
What do you think this record’s place in hip-hop history is?
To me, it represents a low-key turning point that the public at large didn’t pick up on, but other artists making music definitely picked up on. In the years following that, we started to see the tides changing subtly to a style that was more experimental…you started to hear things coming out with no drums. You started to hear people use lines with religious overtones. Jay wasn’t the first one to ever do it, but there were definite moments where I would hear influence in newer and younger artists. His vision, his writing is so unique and compelling that I just think that piece in particular put a fork in the road and showed artists that they could creatively go anywhere. I always felt like he’s one of those artists that is probably a favorite artist of your favorite artist.
Jay Electronica’s tour van for 2008’s Rock the Bells hip-hop festival. Frank FWMJ did the design. Photo credit: Mike Chav
I just think it’s a good thing when anyone steps out and finds their own thing. For him, Act 1: Eternal Sunshine was the moment where he found his unique voice and was able to manifest it. There were a lot of records that came before that, where it was a process of him trying to find that voice. He was a guy who had a good idea of what he was trying to say, but experimented for years with how to present it and package it. And ultimately, I feel like he just said, “Fuck it," and followed what he felt like doing, and there we have the beginnings of the saga.
Ultimately, it needs to be on streaming. I still think they need to pony up and pay Jon Brion and Willy Wonka because it’s a piece of history.
Follow Mike Chav on Instagram.
